In the press

Press quotes

"Unless the EU changes track and agrees to make the EFSF (rescue fund) permanent and the ECB steps up its purchases of the hard-hit countries' government bonds, investors will believe that default is inevitable and demand correspondingly punitive interest rates," said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the London-based Centre for European Reform. "Contagion to other member-states will be all but inevitable. If, and when, it reaches Spain, the crisis risks spiralling out of control," he said.

But Simon Tilford, chief economist at the London-based Centre for European Reform, said the shifting sentiment signaled by Ms Merkel's stance has overwhelmed the temporary calm. "The fact that [the EFSF] is there means they're in a better position than they were in late April or early May [at the height of concerns over Greece], but it doesn't change anything fundamental," Mr Tilford said.

That's partly why experts like Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform in London, are skeptical about Mr Sarkozy's goals. "I think he's hoping that taking on the G20, G8 will bolster his international credentials ... I think that could prove a bit of a forlorn hope. He's taking over at a time of considerable international tension. It's been a long time since we've seen such big differences on positons of key issues among the world's leading economies."...

In a paper published earlier this year [Germany opens Pandora's box] by the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank in London, George Robertson (a former NATO secretary-general), Franklin Miller and Kori Schake (defence policy experts who served in the Bush administration) argued that Germany was opening a Pandora's box by trying to provoke a debate on matters that had long been considered settled.

Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform in London, says Sarkozy "had no choice" other than to get the reform through because otherwise France's - and his - credibility would have suffered. "For anyone outside of France, this looks like a pretty modest move forward ... Other EU countries are moving much much more rapidly" on pension reform.

"EU countries have 89 different weapons programs, while the US, whose budget is more than twice the size of the EU's defence budgets combined, has only 27," said Clara Marina O'Donnell, research fellow at the Centre for European Reform in London. "The main challenge for NATO is that Europe, given its lack of defence capabilities and funds, is not using this chance for greater cooperation, however urgently it is needed." This fragmentation of Europe's defence markets has proved expensive and inefficient.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, has a nice summary of the debate up on his group's website, with some telling insights about the mood in France over the recent bluster from Berlin ... But Mr Grant also points out how destabilising even the narrowly-focused treaty changes envisioned by the 27 countries could be. Even if Ireland and Denmark are able to avoid referenda on the new language - which could be just a sentence or two added to the Lisbon treaty - other countries could cause problems, Mr Grant notes.

"The financial crisis did expose a number of problems with ratings agencies, including major conflicts of interest," Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, told Deutsche Welle. "The people that were paying credit rating agencies were the same people whose securities were being rated. There's also been a certain amount of disquiet about the power that ratings agencies have," he added.

"Europe will be a much more difficult market for Russian energy companies to penetrate in the future," Rem Korteweg, an analyst at the Centre for European Reform, told dpa Insight EU. "If they haven't noticed that yet, they surely will now."